CCChat_The-Jess-Hill-Interview

A conversation with Jess Hill
The family law system has always
been beleaguered and besieged
and so there is this mentality that
nobody really understands what
they have to deal with, and they
do have to deal with a lot. I don’t
envy any family court judge,
lawyer or report writer.
There’s a lot of contesting
allegations that are hard to
unpick but, at the same time,
once you do have expertise in the
area, and you were to actually
give proper time to assessing
families, and maybe not just one
report writer but having a triage
system where a number of
different professionals assess the
family, then, I think, you might
start to get better results.
I think the fact that you’ve got
one report writer, who assesses
them for an hour or two, maybe a
little bit more, maybe then
doesn’t have any proof of the
session aside from their notes,
and can then basically make any
recommendation they like,
without any oversight, that’s
obviously a corruptible system.
Whether or not it is corrupt,
that’s up to people to prove or
disprove but where there is no
accountability, it’s certainly a
system open to corruption.
M: My experience has been that
it is certainly open to very deeply
held biases, take the police for
example, depending on what
your beliefs are. You will take
down notes confirming them and
these notes aren’t written down
until maybe several hours later
and then not used in court until
several months, even years down
the line and when you read the
notes back, it takes on a certain
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